Nov 7, 2012

Dexy - A Powerful, Flexible Documentation Tool

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Dexy is a free-form literate documentation tool for writing any kind of technical document incorporating code. Dexy helps you write correct documents, and to easily maintain them over time as your code changes.

Dexy is a tool for writing documents which relate to code. This might mean software documentation, journal articles relating to computational research, a code tutorial on your blog, writing up computer science class assignments, pretty much anything. You can think of Dexy as a very fancy 'make' tool with lots of document-related features and powerfulfilters. Dexy is open source, licensed under the MIT license.

Features

See Code Run - Dexy helps your code to speak for itself. Show off your code with beautiful syntax highlighting. Write examples and Dexy will run them, inserting the output into any document you wish. Everything is based on live code, so updating is easy, syntax errors blow up on you, not your users, and typos are a thing of the past. With Dexy's smart caching, your code is only executed when it needs updating, saving you time while keeping your documents robust.

Multiple Languages - Language-specific documentation tools make it impossible for you to document all of your project on equal terms. With Dexy, you can document your whole project with one tool, while still taking advantage of each language's special features. Even if you do write in just one language, Dexy will help you show it off like never before. If you have invented a new language, congratulations! Dexy can support it in minutes.

Any Kind Of Document - Unlike some other documentation tools, Dexy doesn't care how you organize your project. Choose from a wide range of document formats, and use any markup language you want. Mix and match as much as you like in any project. You can use Dexy to create books, websites, blog posts, or all of these at once.

Automagic Automation - Dexy's filters do things like run your code and make it pretty, but they can also do just about anything else, like post your docs to a blog or a wiki, or fetch data from an API.